More and more, artists will lend their efforts to increasingly beautiful films as the content within them grows to be more and more placating to the audience — examining serious themes with little to no examination of the social contexts from which they derive, culminating in an emotional climax of spectacular colors and sound to make the audience briefly forget the absence of meaning from the rest of the movie.
Belle, directed by Mamoru Hosoda, is about a girl, Suzu, who suffers from the trauma of her Mom’s martyr death when she was young. She’s invited to a social media virtual reality platform, called “U”, and becomes an overnight music sensation with her beautiful voice under the username, Belle. The implications being that she’s socially distant in real life, unable to form meaningful connections due to her trauma-induced fear of connection, while online, she’s able to express her feelings through music and make seemingly genuine connections with others–as much as that can be done. This sets the stage for examining grief and parasocial relationships. At the same time, she meets another user named The Dragon, who looks beastly and is socially ostracized for being too good at gaming. This also sets the stage for examining the original themes in Beauty and the Beast or to subvert them, namely those of belonging, the weight of past mistakes, and finding love and acceptance despite it all.
These two scenarios have the potential to play off of each other in an interesting way, however, I believe the director’s goal was less to portray or examine these in a weaving narrative and more to build a virtual world to look at aesthetically with jovial 3d models and spectacular, grandiose visual effects while displaying the everyday life and strife of high school. It simultaneously plays on our nostalgia for teenage drama while letting us explore a shiny, new virtual metropolis complete with sensory immersion and a social structure similar to our own, ripe with interaction and connection.
This is, unfortunately, where the setting lacks in developing the themes. Hosoda didn’t create an online space that was genuinely online. There’s a perception that social media is one large forum where everyone and anyone has the ability to shout whatever they want and that everyone will be able to perceive whatever is said. In a sense, there’s a shade of truth, but it relies on the interpretation of social media, of a public forum, as a physical space that its users are confined to rather than a space that users can manipulate and arrange to their preferences, which is then manipulated further by algorithmic outputs, then honed by the user, then manipulated ad infinitum. In Hosoda’s virtual reality, avatars collide and interact with one another, crowd virtual stadiums, flow amongst each other in fish-like schools: it’s beautiful and awe-inspiring. It’s also, even metaphorically, not a realistic depiction of social media. And it’s here where the premise of the narrative separates from the setting. If we are to understand the fracturing of identity online leading to the development of parasocial relationships and a persona, and how that ties into processing, or exacerbating, trauma, we need a setting that does that. By giving physicality to an online space, literally through scanning the user’s biometric data (I would have loved if it took a horror-sci-fi twist on this aspect, but alas), it renders online space as static and establishes a neoliberal rule set whereby all users’ voices are equal to one another, trends are interpreted by everyone in binary fashion, and everything matters all at once. There is no purpose to a persona in this setting¹ because the user is unable to act on the setting through a persona. We develop identities as a way to alter, cull, or grow these connections, but when everything is directly related to each other, when everyone has something to say about Belle or The Dragon regardless of what they say or do, all parasocial relationships are reduced to support or dislike, and the purpose of online persona is invalidated. Now, the narrative thread of Suzu processing her trauma alongside her online fame is thrown astray. The only place they can develop that is in her relationship with the Dragon, since she displayed high school as a place incapable of assisting her through that.
¹ The largely one-sided social connections that develop from social media.
Suzu’s relationship to the Dragon is, as stated, identical to Beauty and the Beast with an ambiguous romantic tension between the two. The relationship, unfortunately, lacks any of the narrative set-up present in Beauty and the Beast. Suzu has an innate concern for the Dragon in the same way that her dead mother had a concern for the vulnerable child trapped in the river during a thunderstorm. It’s meant to narratively drive Suzu to emulate her mother in order to overcome the trauma of her mother’s death. Narratively, this makes sense, but within the social contexts given, this ends up feeling forced. The persecution that the Dragon faces stems from the combination of cancel culture and celebrity culture–within the game, he is pursued by online authorities² and outside the game his identity is subject to intense speculation by media and individuals. Suzu’s concern doesn’t save the Dragon from these onslaught of cultures, as this conflict is a red herring like the Dragon’s real identity. However, despite the red herring, there is no subversion of cancel culture or celebrity culture, where the spontaneity of the people³ is utilized for justice and emancipation of the oppressed. Rather, it’s used as a way for Suzu to shed the avatar of Belle and reveal her true self, despite that not being a major point of conflict for Suzu within the narrative. Her secret identity of overnight music celebrity Belle is treated more as a light-hearted tease than a source of inner turmoil, which was honestly refreshing. I enjoyed it. It should have allowed more focus on Suzu’s arc from a shy, grieving young woman to a more self-confident, socially connected person in the real world. But, this development feels separate from the occurrences within “U”. Which is odd because it would seem to follow logically that as Suzu develops into a more caring and connected person in the real world, the caring would evolve into a better evaluation of the Dragon’s conflict which would then give a clearer solution into how to assist the Dragon, but because her concern for the Dragon is framed as innate, these developments don’t have the opportunity to play off of each other.
²The online authorities are unaffiliated with “U”, backed by corporate sponsors, and enact vigilante justice subjectively, outside the Terms of Service that all users are subject to when using a social media platform. That said, corporate vigilante justice is oxymoronic when we look at law enforcement’s relation to capital within capitalist societies.
³Thank you, Frantz Fanon.
These flaws are laid bare with the climax of the movie. From this point on, major spoilers for the story will be revealed.
The major reveal of the story is that the Dragon is a child who is abused by his high-profile father⁴. The markings on his avatar’s back symbolize the blows dealt by his father. This would be an interesting development of the Dragon’s character, and a subversion of our expectations on the Dragon’s identity, had the conflict not been so suddenly presented so late in the movie without pretext. We know nothing about the Dragon’s character other than the fact that he is aloof and “violent.” The reason isn’t clear, nor does the Dragon discuss anything about himself that would allude to this development prior in the movie. Moreover, the ideas of neglect and abuse are not present in the movie until this point, and by this I mean that the conditions for neglect and abuse are not examined. From the movie’s standpoint, these things are due to the father’s character and a lack of empathy from people online⁵. This lack of interrogation doesn’t lend itself to the narrative at all, as I previously mentioned.
⁴ We speculate, it’s never made explicit what the father’s occupation is, but we assumed him to be a politician of some kind.
⁵ The abused child monologues to Suzu, claiming that people in the past offered to help, but it never came. So he denies the help that Suzu offers him as a result, which makes sense from a trauma standpoint, but also puts the blame on individual behaviors rather than any complex material factors.
Abuse and neglect are complicated subjects with many interweaving factors that cannot be simplified to, “the abuser is a bad person,” which is a pessimistic view which lacks analysis of the situation and denies the transformation of the factors that might lead to them. There is intergenerational trauma, economic anxieties, racial and gendered violence, mental health disorders, sometimes together and sometimes not. By bringing in a heavy topic such as abuse and neglect, it must be treated with the appropriate weight and analysis in order for it to understand what true justice might look like in these types of situations. By tacking on the conflict towards the end of the movie, the director is choosing to utilize the topics as a shock factor to emotionally manipulate the audience rather than to broaden the audience’s imagination as to what brings forth such a development and what resolutions might be possible.
As such, when tackling the trauma Suzu experiences from a young age regarding her mother’s death, by employing the abuse and neglect of the Dragon’s real identity as a vehicle for her to process and overcome her own trauma, we are left with a half-hearted resolution to his abuse and a confusing resolution to Suzu’s trauma. For the Dragon, since none of the factors of the abuse are examined, we are left with the father realizing that he’s a bad person and that he shouldn’t abuse his kids. For Suzu, she utilizes some of the relationships she develops through the movie to locate the kids, but doesn’t use them to save the kids. The death of her mother resulted from her individual heroic act to save a child. To both symbolize healing from trauma through relationships as well as building upon her mother’s sacrifice, it would seem to follow naturally that Suzu and her real life connections would go together to save the abused children. That’s not the case. The narrative doesn’t pay off in a clear or satisfying way and by the end, even though Suzu develops, the journey there is rife with contradictions.
End spoilers.
That all said, what I did like about the movie was its cutting edge visuals, micro-character interactions (I liked the friends Suzu had/made in the film and the other members of her community), and the music slapped pretty good. I also like the virtual reality corporate-backed cop because we could joke and say things like, “By the power of Toyota, I will doxx you!” or “With McDonalds in my left hand and Starbucks in my right, I doxx you!” Watch the movie if you like those things. You won’t find much else to be honest.
